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Private Rocket Industry In Giant Step Skyward

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In a foretaste of bigger things to come, the nation's first private rocket big enough to require a Government license roared into space yesterday on a successful suborbital flight lasting about 15 minutes.

Fired from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, the small rocket carried aloft a 630-pound commercial payload meant to study the short-term effects of weightlessness on industrial manufacturing processes.

The modest debut portends big strides for the fledgling private spacecraft industry, experts say; some predict that it could reap billions of dollars in revenues by the turn of the century.

Such private efforts are unique to America. Elsewhere in the world, rocket companies either are operated exclusively by governments or are mostly subsidized by them. Looking for More Orders

Already, the nation's aerospace giants are hard at work building mammoth vehicles meant to loft 20 large payloads over the next few years at a total contract cost of more than $1 billion, and they are busily looking for more orders and more dollars.

The first orbital launching by this new commercial fleet is set for May from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The rocket that went up yesterday carried scientific experiments that went through more than seven minutes of near-weightlessness after the launching, at 10:42 A.M., Eastern standard time. The craft climbed 198 miles above the earth and landed about 50 miles north of the launching pad.

''It went great,'' Donald K. Slayton, president of Space Services Inc. of America, which developed the launcher, said in a telephone interview. ''The early indications are that the experimenters are happy as pigs in a mud sty. It will be three weeks before they get the full analysis. Up to this point, everything looks as good as you can ask for.''

Mr. Slayton declined to say how much the scientists from the University of Alabama in Huntsville paid to have their experiment lofted into space, but said that a similar launching would cost about $1 million.

Although small private rockets have previously been launched on suborbital flights, yesterday's was the first one large enough to require a license from the Transportation Department.

The rise in such activity is an outgrowth of President Ronald Reagan's push for commercial space ventures, which was helped when he ordered most commercial payloads off the space shuttle after the 1986 Challenger disaster. The action was accelerated early last year when Mr. Reagan announced a new plan to spur private space ventures. The plan called on the Government to buy commercial space goods and services, to limit the liability of private space ventures and to remove legal barriers to creating such ventures.

Under that policy, a 14-foot rocket launched last year from Cape Canaveral became the first to use a Federal launching pad. The rocket was too small, however, to require a Transportation Department license.

The department has about a half-dozen criteria for determining whether a rocket requires a license, including size and the power of the engines. Commercial Parts

The three-ton rocket launched yesterday, the Starfire 1, was assembled from commercially available parts and engines by Space Services, which is based in Houston. Space Services says it plans orbital flights in the future. ''The orbital business is where we'll make the big bucks,'' said a Space Services spokesman, Mark Daniels.

The rocket's payload was assembled by the Consortium for Materials Development in Space of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, one of 16 commercial development consortiums sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

It included experiments intended to measure how liquids mix in weightlessness, how plastic foam forms and cures, how liquids coat glass surfaces, how epoxy reacts in weightlessness and how finely powdered metals bond under high temperature to produce alloys.

The experiments are said to have applications in medicine, the manufacture of metal alloys and in construction of space stations.

A version of this article appears in print on March 30, 1989, on Page D00001 of the National edition with the headline: Private Rocket Industry In Giant Step Skyward. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe